The People Are Absent (In which Heartbreak House and Jonathan Lamb have a fight about character)

In the theatre, we have the sense that there are the characters . . . and then there are the people. Jonathan Lamb describes this distinction in “’Lay Aside My Character’: The Personate Novel and Beyond” (although he specifically discusses the 18th century novel, the article seems interested in the distinction as such). He writes, “it seems generally agreed that characters, whether particularized or not, are public, while persons, if they are really set on privacy, tend towards a narrower role and ultimately an inaccessible particularity, at which point they become something else altogether” (272). By the end of the article, the person is an essential component of fiction, and one that includes both “an ideal self,” set against and supported by a world of fictions, and the ability to author representations of that self (282-4).

The very experience of theatre is one that reinforces this distinction. We see the character (clearly both public and accessible) played by a person (presumably someone with a private, inaccessible life and mind). And inherent to the form is the presence of the author. We are aware that it is the actor who authors the character before us. Beyond that, we know that there is the costume designer, the director, the lighting designer, the playwright, the technical director, and so on. Lamb stresses the faultiness of our sensing faculties: the person is aware of and resists the fictional nature of “all the contingent details of the phenomenal world, and all systems of arranging and judging them” (283). All of the theatrical authors mentioned are making fiction with our empirical experience, and we assume that they exist beneath, in private, as makers. This private world is what the program pretends to represent, with its headshots, biographical notes, letters to the audience about the process of creating the show, and lists of donors who “made it possible.”

And yet, Heartbreak House contends, such a distinction is all nonsense. Making representations is not distinct from living and experiencing an “ideal self”; character is not distinct from person. All of the characters in Heartbreak House perform a series of roles—just as though they were actors onstage—and so they comment on the making of characters. But they are not persons. They have no sense of inner life; indeed, they entirely lack ground. Ellie, for example, is alone at the beginning of the play. She has time; she has quiet; she has a book (appropriately, it is Othello). Does she spend this time in contemplation? No. Does she spend it in a monologue, informing us of some thoughts that have been troubling her, and suggesting conflicts in the work to come? No. Does she spend it considering characters in a play? Not remotely. She lacks an audience . . . and so she falls asleep.

The characters of Heartbreak House are always performing roles, but they are not conscious actors who assume the roles they play. Each time a façade is given up, another façade takes its place. The burglar, it turns out, is actually just pretending; he is really a con artist taking a collection. Except as soon as we accept this new story, Captain Shotover declares that the con artist is the old pirate Billy Dunn . . . except this is a role he has previously assigned to someone else. And so on. And as soon as these figures are no longer playing—indeed, as soon as their present roles begin to erode? They fall sleep. They have nothing else.

If we take Heartbreak House on its face—as a piece in the theatre—it will inevitably appear to redraw Lamb’s distinctions. If, however, we understand the behavior of the characters as an argument about the person underneath those characters, it suggests something entirely different. Actors, authors, and the people whose faces you see in your program? They are a fiction, Heartbreak House argues. They are always characters.